Aaron Gunderson

Aaron Gunderson

Building a Personal Knowledge Base

I have been sold on developing a personal knowledge base for a long time. If you don’t know what a knowledge base is, the main idea an electronic storage place for all your projects, ideas, notes, etc that makes retrieval and association between topics simple. I first stumbled upon this back in college from the tool github.com/noqqe/cmd…

I used cmddocs for a while and even had a shared folder with Seve and Kiana but I eventually gave up on it. Without easy image and file integration it didn’t fit every need. Evernote has been the closest knowledge base tool I have used with years of notes from college through my time at BookBub. Evernote has a few weaknesses but the main one is it’s more of a note taking application then a knowledge base.

I am still struggling with the medium to do this well. The tool needs to encourage data ingress, have support for rich media files and types, encourage daily use, be easy to modifying, tag, have great search and more. I think there is a tool here that would find a solid niche. DEVONthink may be it but it’s Mac only so no bueno. This tool would hopefully be helpful in making decisions and systematizing my knowledge.

After finishing Ray Dalio’s Principles this week I have a lot to dissemble but one thing they talked about was expert systems for decision making. I am also curious if some personal expert system could fit into a knowledge base too.

Do you have a personal knowledge base, wiki or note taking strategy you think works well? I am interested in hearing about it. Especially if it works well on Ubuntu!